Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

  Meanwhile I thought to learn something about their history, which I did by taking an evening course at the City Literary Institute in ‘The Art and History of the Cinema’, a series of rather dry theoretical lectures with an exam at the end of the term which I at least passed with honours. I think I knew intuitively – or sensed it from the early Hollywood, helter-skelter one-reelers – that getting into pictures required some daring personal action, like turning up brazenly at the studio gates and asking for a job. Your literally ‘broke’ into pictures. It was all about chance, energy, personality – and charm no doubt, one of my qualities apparently, which Hubert and others had harped on about, to my detriment. In any case there was no course or exam then that could get you behind a camera.

  But now in London I was at least working professionally among books at the bookshop. There were books, books and more books. Buying them on trips with Stanley, selling them, reading, dipping into them, taking Steegmuller’s Life of Flaubert out to read on a bench by the Natural History Museum. And back in my swagged and sombre Hampstead bedroom, with ivory dip pen and silver inkpot, writing a first short story called ‘The Tide’ about two children laboriously making a wonderful sandcastle on a beach and being dismayed, forgetting that the tide is coming in to wash it all away. I suppose this was the start of my literary writing, though I didn’t think it at the time. I still wanted to get into films, to get my Balzac short story adaptation made into a movie.

  What impulse made me take up writing my own fiction? I think, like my pretending to be a painter, with expensive oils and brushes, it fuelled a need to create a fictional life, to get right away from what had pained me in real life. ‘We lead lives of selected fiction,’ Lawrence Durrell wrote. I had first chosen the life of a Hampstead painter, then a poet, and, failing in those scenarios, I now thought to try that of a Hampstead writer.

  At the bookshop I worked in the basement, with Paddy the Irish packer, a delightful Tipperary man, slow and considered in everything, with his neat rolls of twine and reams of brown parcel paper on his bench. But he had one problem (or perhaps it was a virtue). He hated the telephone, and while Stanley was out to lunch, and Paddy sometimes had to hold the fort upstairs, and when the telephone rang … well, one day, coming up from the basement and without his seeing me, I saw him approach the ringing machine, essaying, like a bullfighter, a grab, a tease at the beast, then retreating, then having another go, but still refusing to pick it up, with a final retreat to Stanley’s desk where he sat down and looked preoccupied with other more serious matters, while the phone went on ringing.

  My main job was typing out the titles, condition and prices of hundreds of second-hand popular novels by authors such as Mazo de la Roche and Howard Fast, on Gestetner waxed paper, then duplicating the pages, stapling them and sending them out to all the public libraries. Upstairs Stanley worked the ancient wooden roll-of-paper till, pocketing his lunch money from it, and once or twice a year he got out a fine printed catalogue of the expensive books, antiquarian and modern first editions, many by Irish writers: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold, in ‘near mint condition’ I remember, signed by Stephens, priced ten guineas. Cheap at the price, perhaps, for such a fine signed presentation copy.

  But Stanley was quite prepared to up the price if he knew a customer wanted a particular book. He had a rich French client in London who collected Proust’s first editions, and had all of them, except his first book, Les Plaisirs et les Jours, a luxury volume with a foreword by Anatole France and romantic chocolate-box flower illustrations by Proust’s friend Madeleine Lemaire.

  Stanley bought the book from an extraordinary little man, Jewish and energetic, a Mr Mushlin, a freelance book dealer who would come into the shop without warning and tempt Stanley with his valuable wares, usually author-signed first editions, always in ‘Very Fine’ or ‘Mint’ condition, neatly enveloped in cellophane and highly priced. Mushlin had sold Stanley many of the Irish writers’ first editions that Stanley specialized in, and now he came up with exactly the book that Stanley’s rich French friend wanted: Les Plaisirs et les Jours. Apart from a dozen copies on special paper for Proust’s intimates, it was one of only a hundred or so copies for the public. It was a heavy art-deco covered coffee-table book, with a selection of Proust’s tyro fiction – decadently romantic, snobbish stories about duchesses, countesses and princesses with their gallant young lovers. Highly unrealistic but with all the spawn of Proust’s future genius, when he refined his aristocratic idealism about the French haut monde into a picture of that society’s terrible emotional and physical corruption.

  Stanley wasn’t greatly interested in Proust’s work. It was the writers of the Irish literary renaissance who interested him, and in marrying my aunt Sally, whose father Old Joe had known all the writers of that renaissance and had many letters, papers and signed books from them, Stanley gained a particularly good contact in this field.

  Knowing of Stanley’s Irish interests, Mr Mushlin also came up with a selection of Joyce’s first editions, Chamber Music, Portrait of an Artist, Dubliners, Pomes Pennyeach, and of course the prize item, the first edition of Ulysses, in ‘Fine’ condition, one of seven-hundred-and-fifty copies, in its big quarto, Greek-blue cover, with all the French printer’s misprints. (Joyce scholars have since identified some of these as intentional – Joyce’s intention, not the French printer’s mistakes – all wonderful grist for the mill of the Joyce industry.)

  The fiftieth anniversary of ‘Bloomsday’, 6 June 1954, was coming up, so Stanley agreed that I could clear the shop window and display just the five Joyce first editions. I did so, the books neatly spaced out with little notices which I’d typed beneath each of them – just the title, that they were first editions, with the dates and prices. People stopped and looked at the window with interest. But no one came in and bought the books. Stanley had priced the first edition of Ulysses at two hundred and fifty pounds, I think, and the other four books at around one hundred pounds each. There were no takers from my splendid window display.

  There was one place, though, with more than serious money available for these sorts of books, and Stanley had good connections with this institution, the Ransome Library at the University of Texas, Austin. He sold all five books to them for a thousand pounds, I think. And cheap at the price. The copy of Ulysses that he sold then would fetch upwards of fifty thousand pounds today.

  The one book (or the unbound pages, which were all there ever was of it) that Mr Mushlin never came up with was the real first edition of Dubliners, which my grandfather had at least printed, in 1909, when he started the publishers Maunsel and Co. in the 1900s, and was in the money. He knew Joyce and had corresponded with him in Trieste about publishing the short stories. Unfortunately a page proof got into the hands of the British authorities in Dublin Castle and reading ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ they considered it disrespectful to King Edward VII, and threatened a libel action if the story was published. My grandfather’s partner, a Mr Reynolds from Liverpool, took fright and burnt all the unbound sheets of the book, so that not a single page of this first edition of Dubliners has ever come to light. What was my grandfather doing meanwhile? He was taking a leisurely trip, driving from the Holy Land across Persia to Tashkent in an early automobile with a friend (the friend was driving, one hopes) and knew nothing of the book’s incineration until his return. Mr Reynolds, though he knew about publishing, was thought generally (except by my grandfather it seems) to have been a man of sharp practice in the business. The story went round later that to start with my grandfather had the money and Reynolds the experience. After the firm collapsed, Reynolds disappeared with most of Old Joe’s capital, and their positions were reversed.

  Worse still, had my grandfather been on the spot in Dublin he could surely have managed to keep one set of the unbound sheets of Dubliners, and Stanley could have sold this unique printing for a small fortune to the University of Texas in the 1950s. My grandfather could have lived i
n clover for the rest of his life, and not worried about getting me into the merchant navy. Poor Old Joe. He shouldn’t have gone to Tashkent.

  To some extent, financially, he made up for his loss here with his famous Irish author connections. Stanley, in the mid-1950s, having laboriously catalogued all my grandfather’s Yeats papers, comprising scores of letters and all the other papers relevant to his biography of the poet, sold this ‘parcel’, as Stanley liked to refer to such goods, to the University of Texas, for something in the region of $20,000. Stanley then sold to Texas all Old Joe’s George Moore papers, which he’d had in the writing of his biography of Moore, and his book on the family, The Moores of Moore Hall, for half the price of the Yeats collection – Moore being lower down on the authorial stock market. (Unfair, I think, as several of Moore’s novels, and certainly his three autobiographies, are splendid books, tactfully conceited and exaggerated as the memoirs are.)

  I think Stanley took a fifty per cent cut in these sales to Texas, with Old Joe taking the other half, at least a hundred thousand pounds in today’s money. But Old Joe continued to play the poor mouth, though now, with the Texas windfall, he needn’t have had any more financial mournings over his cheque stubs with the smelly dachshunds on the sofa. Or worries about paying for me, which he was still doing, as I learnt to my surprise years later, paying Sally and Stanley another thirty shillings a week for my keep in Hampstead above my own thirty shillings, which was something none of them mentioned to me. Instead Sally said I was paying too little for my keep and should be paying more. My grandfather was not the only member of his family who was tight with the purse strings, but he was more forthright about his imagined penury, at least with the Butlers. He writes to Peggy, in response to some angry meeting or letter from her or from Hubert at this time in the early 1950s:

  My dear Peggy,

  Thank you, thank you – but I have never questioned your goodness, or that of Hubert towards Joe. On the contrary, I have acknowledged it with gratitude time and time again. What has annoyed me is that there is no reciprocal realisation on the Butler part of the very difficult moral problem with which I have been confronted for years, ever since Nat began to bring children into the world without the means to support them, and then himself became invalid.

  My own view has always been that my first economic responsibility is towards Vera and David, then to Nat, and only thirdly to Nat’s issue. Actually it has been a mathematical certainty that our spending on capital on two and three above will, if we live, reduce us to penury in a few years time. I do not think therefore that Hubert was justified in calling me ‘mean’. ‘Immoral’ might be truer in the context of encouraging Vera to increase her expenditure on Joe. But perhaps Hubert has an exalted idea of my circumstances? …

  Yrs. ever,

  Joe.

  Perhaps Hubert had got news of the Texas windfall? On the other hand, Old Joe’s problems about Nat were surely more financial than moral, in his having to pay for the support of three of his son’s children. And he was mean about this. But since they weren’t his children surely he had some right to his miserliness in the matter? And Hubert might have seen this in his dealings with Old Joe about me.

  There was one other interesting episode in my Beauchamp Bookshop days. Interesting because had the project succeeded, I might have got into movies straight away, though not as a technician, which was what I wanted. Stanley had seen an advert in the Telegraph asking for unknowns, teenagers, to play the part of the young Alexander in an epic Hollywood movie, Alexander the Great, which the American director Robert Rossen was casting for. Stanley, all cock-a-hoop, said I must apply for the role at once. I was ideally suited for the part, he thought. But photographs, obviously, were required in the application. So Stanley arranged an appointment with a friend of his, Paul Tanqueray, a society photographer, round the corner in Thurloe Place. I went ahead with the idea, keen to embark on another fictional life, seeing myself now as a movie star.

  I turned up at the studio and the society photographer, summing me up appreciatively, asked me to take off my shirt and vest. I stripped to my trousers. I felt he wanted me to take those off as well. He had bright lights and a matt cloth background. Against this, and blinding me with the lights, he asked me to assume various athletic poses, particularly a sort of Charles Atlas pose – biceps and pectorals tensed, hands clasped about my crotch. Suggesting I twist this way and that, he clicked away with enthusiasm.

  The photographs were sent off and a week later there was a letter from the producer asking me to come for an appointment with Mr Rossen at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane. I was dazzled by the meeting in the drawing-room of his suite at the hotel. It was summer and there were a lot of flowers everywhere, and it was all very grand. Fully dressed now, we talked a little, and Mr Rossen was tactful in his enquiries and didn’t look me over like raw meat as the society photographer had done. Then he asked me to read from the script, which I did quite reasonably, I felt. After twenty minutes he stood up and shook my hand. Yes, he surely thought well of me for the part. But in the event not quite well enough to cast me as the young Alexander. Perhaps, looking at the photograph [see illustration], my hairstyle was not quite Macedonian enough? The producer wrote a polite letter a week later declining my services. None the less I like to think I was within a hair’s breadth of becoming a movie star. In the event Richard Burton played the older Alexander. Who played the young hero? I don’t know. I’ve never seen the movie.

  More important to me than books or being a painter, a poet, a writer or a movie star was my first experience of the world of magic make- believe, the professional fantasy life – in this instance the theatre – an experience supplied by Tony Guthrie who, expectedly, was the one person in my family who didn’t think my ambitions in that direction were unreal. He was producing La Traviata at Covent Garden and later that year he asked me to come round with him and watch rehearsals. We went in through the stage door, and suddenly we were in the great gilt and velvet auditorium, where he took a seat in the stalls with his script, notes and, supplied by his wife Judy, a thermos of tea and a blanket, for it was a chilly day. The artistes, in this case the chorus and small-part players, were assembled on stage, with a man at an upright piano, the repetiteur, at the side of the stage.

  Tony was usually much happier directing the chorus, bit-part players and spear carriers in his productions than dealing with the stars, who he thought had a tendency to get above themselves and be tiresome. Having consulted his notes, he stood up, all six foot six of him, and really pelted into the business. He clapped his hands and, with his fierce military smile, said: ‘Well, then, are we all assembled? Right, Act One, the intro. And this time, can we have more speed on the tempo?’ (Looking at the repetiteur and then round the stage.) ‘And MUCH more twirl and swirl from all of you, if you please. This is not the death-bed scene. Not yet. Right?’

  Right. The pianist played a faster tempo, the chorus belted into song and started a very vigorous swirl and twirl and Tony went to the back of the stalls to see how it all looked from there; and I watched it all, fascinated. This was the real world, or something very like it, for me. Later Tony told me he’d take me to see his agent the following week, to see what chances, what openings there might be in films for me. I was surely on the first rung of the ladder on my way to the stars.

  TEN

  I wasn’t. There is now a stage demon, wheezy, sleek haired, jaw-crunching, jumping in with a puff of acrid smoke from the wings in the shape of my interfering father, wanting to change everything in my life for the worse. Nat writes to Hubert on 22 November 1954:

  Dear Hubert

  I hear that you have been recently in London and gather that you have seen Joe. It seems that he is trying to get an Irish passport, and it is possible that for ordinary travel and holiday purposes he might be entitled to one, though not of course without his mother’s and my consent. We suspect however that his purpose is to disappear to the continent for a long period (say
until he is 27) during a part of which he is liable to military service in this country. His mother and I have been very exercised and anxious in our own minds as to whether we should give this consent for a passport. (We have, of course, been aware that this matter would probably arise).

  For different reasons Biddy and I are both against giving our consent; but I feel that perhaps you might think differently and that you might have some arguments on the other side which I ought to take into consideration. I would be grateful in any case if you could let me know how you feel about the problem.

  My regards to Peggy,

  Yours,

  Nat Hone.

  5th December. Since writing this letter (and not posting it) I hear that a new bill to be introduced in the present parliamentary session will make 36 (instead of 26) the age of liability to call up. It seems ludicrous that he should be facilitated to play hide and seek with the authorities here for that length of time.

  Well, I had no mind to dodge any authorities in Britain, just as I had an even stronger mind not to do any National Service. Though I was born in London, my mother was born in Ireland and my father was certainly Irish, albeit Anglo-Irish-American, and I had spent over fifteen years in Ireland and only a few years in England, and thus so far as I was concerned I owed no military allegiance to Britain. Indeed, with all this parental Irish background, I could certainly have got an Irish passport, as I eventually did. Nor, if I got an Irish passport, had I any intention of running off to the continent for ten years. How my father got this nonsense into his mind I’ve no idea. But what is clear is that, having abandoned me as a two-year-old, and taken no responsibility for my upbringing later, and having done little or no work himself (least of all in the armed forces) and lived half his life off my mother’s earnings, he was now insisting that I take the Queen’s shilling. And to ensure that I did so he would deny me an Irish passport, which of course would not just have been available to me for ‘holiday and travel purposes’ but would have made me an Irish citizen and not therefore liable for military service in Britain, as Nat appreciates without his quite saying so. All this high moral tone of his about my having to take on obligations (which he never did himself) shows, in these circumstances, an extraordinary dictatorial impertinence.